


everywhere i go (the hard to keep track of you remix)

by allthingsholy



Category: Big Bang Theory, Dollhouse
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:00:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthingsholy/pseuds/allthingsholy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His eyes are still so very blue.</p><p>She steps forward and for a second she forgets about the war and the chaos and the rest of the world falling to pieces around them. This is her first mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	everywhere i go (the hard to keep track of you remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Half-Awake in a Fake Empire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/55206) by [betternovembers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/betternovembers/pseuds/betternovembers). 



> Written for the Paradox Summer Remix challenge.

The first time she sees him, she’s hiding behind a dumpster in the middle of downtown LA and the city’s a war zone. Her fingers still around her gun (one at her hip, one more in her bag, and one always, _always_ in her hand) and there he is: the same posture, the same mannerisms. He waves a group of people forward with a long-fingered hand and she remembers him too well, even now. The group surges toward her and then he’s there, just out of reach, and she steps out into the street, one hand on her gun and the other dangling useless at her side. When he jerks the gun to his shoulder and stares at her down the barrel, she thinks, _Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all._

His eyes are still so very blue.

She steps forward and for a second, she forgets about the war and the chaos and the rest of the world falling to pieces around them. This is her first mistake.

\--

He doesn’t have gaps in his memory, or know about the in-betweens. His eyes narrow in recognition and then he says her name (he draws it out with more drawl than she remembers) and something comes to life in her chest, but then she realizes: there’s no familiarity there. She’s a famous actress, and even with the world shot to shit, more people than not knew her face. It hurts more than she thought it would and she’s had to withstand a lot.

He introduces himself with little courtesy. “Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D.” He’s the head of a motley crew, tech experts all, and they think they have a plan. It takes a thorough round of questions before they decide to trust her and the hesitation with which he finally drops his gun makes her think he never really will. He surely doesn’t yet. There’s little time for pleasantries as she wins most of them over with hidden stockpiles, safe places she’s ferreted out in the months since the city went crazy, but when she nails a walker between the eyes from 100 yards away, there’s a flash of respect in his eyes she won’t let herself mistake for affection.

\--

They become a unit. A unit she doesn’t want to leave, either. There’s safety in numbers. That’s what she tells herself. It doesn’t have anything to do with his hands on a gun like she always imagined, with the thrill that runs up her spine when they’re on the move (in perfect sync, in perfect harmony, and she tells herself it’s nothing more than latent programming), with the fact that for the first time in a long time, she’s happy to be alive. There’s a skirmish and a victory and when she turns to him in triumphant jubilation, she watches his face to see if something flickers or gives (it never does). And then her hands are cold on the hot steel of her gun again and the world feels a little bit smaller.

She catalogs his differences like a penance. The bark in his tone that is all bite, the detached kick of his boot as he shifts a body out of his path. She wonders if the coldness she sees in him—the calculating, objective eyes he casts on everyone and everything they meet—come naturally or if they’re just a by-product of the war. There are moments when something in his face seems to give, when it is a war and a lifetime ago and they are happy again.

 _It isn’t real,_ she tells herself. _It was never real._ There’s a fire, an explosion, something pushing them always, always forward and whatever flickered in his face is gone.

It always ends the same.

\--

They catch sleep in starts and fits, pull a few hours’ rest when they can. She dreams of him, of their time together, of lazy Sundays doing the crossword in bed, of his hand on the inside of her thigh, of his mouth at her shoulder or her neck. It’s been years since she last saw him (a relocation to New York and she couldn’t quite bring herself to find the Dollhouse there, couldn’t look too closely at the reasons it felt like betrayal) but she’s thought of him often in the interim. His eyes, his hands, the steady weight of him above and beside her. It’s what she dreams about at night and when she wakes to find him looking at her, eyes alert as he keeps watch, there’s a burning in her belly that has nothing to do with too many days without food. She takes the rifle from his hand and passes him the scrap of fabric that serves for a blanket these days, and when their fingers touch (their fingers always touch and it is never, ever by accident) she bites her lip hard enough to break skin. She spends the hours until sunrise watching him sleep, wanting to slip down beside him and kiss the familiar spot behind his ear. She never does.

\--

The others talk about the tech like it’s superhuman. They theorize, speculate, try to imagine what kind of greed and entitlement made anyone think they could handle such power. Penny bites her tongue and cleans her gun. Sheldon talks about moral relativity and the rights of the few and the many. He talks about string theory, about parallel universes where none of this ever happened.

Penny hopes in one of those universes, the lives she imagined for them (neighbors, friends, lovers, partners) actually happened. Even as a dream, it feels like too much to hope for.

\--

The others may speculate, but she’s seen enough to know where the world went wrong. Blank faces, empty eyes. People filled with lives and memories that aren’t their own. It’s so familiar it turns her stomach.

She never tells him he was a part of the thing that ruined the world. She’s glad they took the memory from him, left him with a clean slate.

She envies him the easy judgment he passes on people like her.

\--

“What did you do, before?”

Sheldon’s hands still over the bread he’s portioning, meticulously exact measurements for each of them. “I was a scientist.”

And Penny knows that, knows where he did his undergraduate studies, his post-grad research. She knows where he was born and she asks anyway.

It’s a still night. Everyone else is lounging around (as much as they can lounge with loaded shotguns at their feet), telling stories from before. He frowns (and she knows the lines of his face, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and she wants to reach out and smooth them away with the pad of her thumb) and says, “I watched your show.”

It hurts like the worst kind of disappointment. That he knows her face, her eyes, all through the plasma flat of a TV screen. That for him, the distance between them is endless. For her, it’s just heartbeats.

There’s a long silence. She doesn’t know what he thinks about, if when he crawls inside his head (as he so often does, and this is maybe the most notable difference of all, how prone he is to silences) whether he looks forward or behind.

Someone at the fire laughs. Penny scrapes the last bits of juice from a can of beans. Sheldon stands to go back to the fire but stops for a minute, turned away from her. His jaw muscle works for a long second before he says, “Maybe we deserved this. Maybe we got exactly what we asked for.”

He doesn’t wait for her to answer. She watches him go back to the group, watches him pass the plate of bread and make sure everyone’s getting exactly their fair share. _Maybe we got exactly what we asked for._ She doesn’t know if he meant the war or what came before, and she wonders not for the first time (or the hundredth, or the thousandth) what he was running from. What made the Dollhouse seem like a better option.

 _Maybe we got what we asked for._ It’s moments like this when he’s so unlike the Sheldon she knew. When she can close her eyes and pretend it’s just another role, another scene partner, a guy she met at the end of the world and that could be all it is.

But when she heads to bed without dinner, stretching out next to her gear and looking up at the stars, she can’t pretend. In another life, Sheldon taught her the constellations, their names and the stories to go with them. He’s just there, just out of reach, sitting still on a tree stump and keeping watch over all of them. He feels so goddamn far away. Penny curls around herself, pulling her knees to her chest, all on her own. Again.

\--

They make their way out of the city and into the desert. They leave their tech behind, and more than a few of their number. Their camp is small and limping, but resilient. One month passes, then two. No butchers. No dumbshows. (Penny still sleeps with a gun in her reach. Quiet is one thing. Safe is something else entirely.)

Sheldon comes to her one night, hands clasped behind his back as he stands at her feet and there’s no mistaking his intentions. She waits for that flicker of recognition, that shimmer of _something_ when he says her name. His voice sounds the same. He still fits so perfectly against her, pressed up against all the places she’s missed him. She slides her hands up his shoulders, across the plane of his back, and wonders if he’ll remember (remember the sex, remember the crossword, remember anything about her before she had a gun in her hands), but he won't. _He won't._


End file.
